And your problem with that is?

I submit as a law of editorial physics that the author’s desire to include a fact in her narrative is directly proportional to the effort she expended to find it out, not to its relevance.

Editor: Betsy, this paragraph about how the congressman won a Boy Scout merit badge for whittling doesn’t really seem like something we need right here. Or anywhere.

Betsy: But I got that from his old troop leader! The guy wasn’t even in the phone book – I found him living in a mobile home at the end of a dirt road. It was a sweltering day, I interviewed him in Spanish…

.

-"When Journalists Become Authors"

One of those days

"Some days I'll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it's like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue."

-Charlie Brooker

Remember to wear your hat

Luck matters. It just does. But you can maximize luck. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t wander out into the field covered in tinfoil and old TV antennae.

-Chuck Wendig

Why books will not die: a range of opinion

"Underneath everything, underneath the machinations of the industry and the terrible dance of agent-getting and submissions, underneath the despair and joy and wild mood swings, underneath the misery and extraordinary grace of trying to make art--underneath it all, we just want to sit together and tell stories."

-The Rejectionist

"The advantage of the books is you can give them as a gift. Our society hasn’t yet evolved to the point where we can say, “Hey, check out this URL,” and pass that off as a present, so until we reach that point, books it is."

-Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

A long story

More years ago than I want to count, I decided to write a book and get it published. So I got this Daruma, and if I understand the Japanese custom correctly, you color in one eye when you start a project, and the other when you meet your final goal. So here's how he looked for all those years, his eye, originally filled in with a permanent black Sharpie, gradually fading to gray.



To make a very long story short, well, there it is. So here Daruma is getting his other eye.



And here he is, with the finished book, with the slightly different colors of his eyes representing my years of effort, or something like that.



And here's the whole deal with a pug added because everything is better with a pug.

(There are pugs in the book too! Also zoo animals! In case that makes anyone more inclined to purchase a copy. And you can read a chapter here.)

Some quotes from some Johns that I am keeping in mind for the new year

“True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.”
-John Waters

I wanted to write all-ages books, kids’ literature that stands up when you read it today... It may be that this is not what the market wants, but as an exercise it was what I wanted to do. It also stops you leaning on lazy attention-getting devices – sudden death, sudden sexy times. You have to be a lot more resourceful as you write.
-John Allison

There are many things this world has too much of, but books and storytellers are not two of them.
-John Scalzi

Sounds right to me

Of course there are different reasons to write, but if you’re interested in getting something published in the commercial marketplace, the only opinion that matters is that of the person who can either sell it (the agent) or buy it (the editor). My advice these days is not to share your work-in-progress with more than two or maybe three people whose opinions you trust and respect, and ideally have some experience in the very delicate art of offering artistic criticism.

-Matthew Gallaway, "Five writers explain how they got, kept and fired agents."

The real meaning of "not safe for work"

Note: if you click on his example link, don't say you haven't been warned.

Personally, I’m a freelance writer, so I work out of my home office. That means that everything on the internet is safe for work, or more precisely, nothing is. Without the peer pressure of nearby co-workers and boss-types, the internet is a constant, beguiling temptation, like one of the Sirens of Greek myth if you could embed Flash in her.

I’d appreciate someone inventing the “NSFF” tag for me, so I would know that I’m about to click on something that’s going to grab me and not let me go until I’ve sacrificed a couple of deadlines to its insatiable hunger for attention.

Nudity would not, as a rule, get this tag. Nudity is so commonly available on the web that it’s not that distracting. I appreciate it, but take it for granted, like paper clips. If nudity is unsafe for work in the sense that standing on the top shelf of a ladder is unsafe, then TV Tropes is unsafe for work in the sense that running with scissors, near a pool, into the path of an oncoming train is unsafe.

-Lore Sjöberg (who also wisely said,

I'm inclined to like wombat because "wombat" is a great name. It's got a "wom," and a "bat," and an "omba.")

"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

“Here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says, ‘Nobody has to read this crap’. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, nor the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the Tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who, given a chance, will stop reading in a fifth of a second. So the first sentence you write will be the most importance sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you may feel compelled to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.”

-Tim Radford via Ed Yong.

(Also thanks Stephen Crane and vozamer.)

Where do your ideas come from

Yeah, it's like a disease, really.

Creativity is like an itch. When you scratch it, it feels good, and then it itches more. You fulfill the aesthetic urge and it pushes you to create more.

But if you don't have the itch to begin with, it's hard to know where to scratch. There's no way to "get ideas." It can't be forced. They just happen. You're eating breakfast one day and you have an idea, and either you forget about it, or you work on it and execute it. The more of your ideas you execute, the more ideas occur to you.

-Drew ("Toothpaste for Dinner")

All out of Plan Bs

Your first novel was rejected thirty-seven times... Anyway, what kept you going before your unexpected success as Lemony Snicket? Were you ever tempted to throw in the towel as a writer?

I was sorely tempted but could not think up anything else to do. This is how it is for most writers I know - they soldiered on simply because there was no Plan B.

-from an interview with author Daniel Handler

Take Back the Words!

I was just checking the final copyedits of my book which is appearing in the spring, which includes a scene where zookeepers are chasing a raccoon around a Dumpster. That's right, Dumpster, capitalized, because it turns out, this word is a trademark.

Well, three pages of a novel that include the word Dumpster, capitalized, multiple times, reads like advertising copy for the Dumpster Corporation, so I wanted to replace it. But there is no synonym. I got suggestions from many people. They were either circumlocutions that couldn't replace one word repeatedly, or technical descriptions that no one would recognize, or words for a thing that was similar to a Dumpster but not identical.

I also discovered that many words that we all feel are normal English words are also still trademarked, like Laundromat and Bubble Wrap. Bubble Wrap!!!

Well, I've had enough. I want to start a Movement. Why are corporations allowed to interfere with the natural evolution of language? The way it works now, you can get in trouble if you use a trademark generically - but why does a corporation get to decide how we can use the language? If everyone else, as English speakers, needs the word, why does a corporation get to keep it?

Poppers of bubble wrap in dumpsters out behind laundromats, unite! You have nothing to lose but your superfluous capital letters!

Helping out a fellow creator of fiction

I was walking home from the store with the pugs the other day, when a nicely dressed guy stopped me with a sob story about how his car had broken down and he was short seven dollars for a fan belt. He told me that his brother had a pug, but it was much fatter than mine, and that it was really jealous when you pay attention to anyone else, and that he was a manager at the Jerry's sub shop over on 16th street and if I ever came up that way he could repay me.

I told him I worked at the store around the corner and he said oh sure, he came in sometimes to buy cat food for his mother, he could pay me back then.

The mother's cat was the last straw. I decided to give him the money because if the story wasn't true, he had done enough work coming up with the details, he had earned it.

I liked that it wasn't a big tale of trauma and drama, just a well executed version of a classic tale, with details carefully chosen to create believable characters, and I want to live in a world where that is worth at least seven dollars.

Oops

One of the things I hated about being a college professor was when people asked me what I did for a living. Along with it being impossible to explain what linguistics is, it just seemed like such a pretentious thing to be.

So then I went to the other extreme and worked at a job where I had to haul bales and sweat and get sore and have poop all over my clothes.

Now, when people ask what I do, I have to say I am a writer. Which combines all the pretentiousness of being a professor with the low pay of being a zookeeper.

I guess I am going to have to keep trying till I get this right.

Goals

Yesterday I met a local blogger and my first thought was "He sounds taller in writing." My second was that I hoped that I do too.

How to save the publishing industry

The other day I started the fourth book in a row that I did not want to continue reading past the first few chapters. And I thought, you know, maybe I just don't like to read books anymore. Lots of people never read books. Maybe I'm one of them.

Of course this makes it a bit awkward that I still want to write books. I mean, if I don't buy books anymore, how can I expect there to be an industry left to publish mine?

But my Technical Staff pointed out that the solution was very simple and logical. All I have to do is buy books and not read them. The genius of this, of course, is that it's what I am already doing. Now if we could just get more people to follow suit. Who knew that it could be so simple to save the whole book business?

My dream

Today, Wombatarama's Hollywood correspondent reported that she had read a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and hadn't liked it, but it had been useful for killing two flies.

See, that's why it's not enough to write articles and I will not rest until I get at least ONE of my damn books published. After so much time spent writing stuff that's only good for lining the birdcage, one longs to produce something lasting. Something that can at least be used to kill a fly or to prop up a table leg, you know?

It's all connected, part 2

Lately I saw the episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" that takes place in DC. He he visited a place that I've written about for the local paper, and he ate chili dogs with a famous writer that I sort of know (well, I know his wife and dogs better, but I've been in his house, and he's been in my backyard).

I felt cool, once removed. It was nice.

It's all connected

This week, I figured out that someone I didn't recognize who'd sent a friend request on Facebook was a "real person" I'd interviewed for a story a year ago; I heard someone call in to a radio show who was another real person I'd interviewed for a story for the local paper; and then I was checking a site that aggregates pet news stories and saw one of my own.

My life is weird.

To err is human

Today, for a second, I thought I'd lost a Panamanian golden frog at the Reptile House. It's hard to explain what a sickening feeling that is. Fortunately, it was just hiding on the side under the lip of a jar, no doubt laughing at me, but I actually ought to thank it for reminding me to have a sense of perspective.

A couple months ago I got the name of something slightly wrong in a story, and they had to run a correction, and it was a huge mortifying deal that made me and everyone look bad, and I was miserable and felt like a huge idiot, etc. It is important to remember at a moment like that - at least, in the work I do now, I can't kill anything. The worst mistake I can make is still really no big deal in comparison.

I used to think of something similar when I taught linguistics. One of the good things about my field, instead of teaching, say, medicine, or how to build bridges, was this: when a linguistic theory fails catastrophically, no blood is shed. I could be sure that none of my students was ever going to accidentally kill anyone using the material I had taught them.

Well, unless someone died of boredom, of course.